It has to be an issue with the runtime (which, in true Microsoft style, is blaming Eraser). On my Windows 7 system, the Eraser 6 running process takes up about 6,200K. As .NET does it's own garbage collection, the Eraser code cannot cause a memory leak. I'm afraid this one is for Joel; I cannot be more help than that.

David

I am not an Eraser programmer, but a long-time user; my views may not be the same as those of the Eraser programming team.Before posting, please read the top 4 topics in the Eraser FAQ, which already provide many of the answers users need.

Joel does what he does for Eraser voluntarily (no pay, no freebies, just public service). If, from time to time, the rest of his life gets in the way of the work on Eraser, that is (1) only to be expected and (2) part of the price we all pay for having free, open source software. I don't know when Joel will be back on the forum; in the meantime, the great majority of Eraser users have a usable free application in a field which is not exactly crowded with alternatives.

Secondly, the point I was making is that the issue has to be with your installation of the .NET framework, because that is what handles memory management. The .NET functions ascribe the use to Eraser, but, if something is wrong, there is (as far as I know) nothing in the Eraser code itself that can affect the issue one way or the other; that is how Microsoft designed .NET. If my (and other users') memory usage were the same as yours, that, perhaps would be an Eraser issue, but that is not the case.

Of course, there was a design decision to use .NET as the Eraser runtime; this decision is explained in the FAQ post on Eraser architecture (and is in any case now irreversible). In my experience, all runtime libraries have memory management issues of one sort and another, and the more recent versions of .NET are better behaved than some others. Indeed, if the system has no immediate use for the memory, it my just not have released it yet. The real issue is not how much memory is, or is claimed to be, in use, but whether there is any degradation of system performance resulting from that usage.

David

I am not an Eraser programmer, but a long-time user; my views may not be the same as those of the Eraser programming team.Before posting, please read the top 4 topics in the Eraser FAQ, which already provide many of the answers users need.

Joel does what he does for Eraser voluntarily (no pay, no freebies, just public service). If, from time to time, the rest of his life gets in the way of the work on Eraser, that is (1) only to be expected and (2) part of the price we all pay for having free, open source software. I don't know when Joel will be back on the forum; in the meantime, the great majority of Eraser users have a usable free application in a field which is not exactly crowded with alternatives.

No need to get anything straight, I am aware of the great committment shown by people like Joel who selflessly devote great chunks of their personal time to creating a product for free. If my post suggested otherwise then, of course, I am deeply apologetic.

DavidHB wrote:. The real issue is not how much memory is, or is claimed to be, in use, but whether there is any degradation of system performance resulting from that usage.

David

I have 6 gig of RAM in this machine and, yes, I could tell when the leeching was occuring; not only in system degradation but because my pc sounded like an aircraft about to take off

chuckles1066 wrote:I have 6 gig of RAM in this machine and, yes, I could tell when the leeching was occurring; not only in system degradation but because my pc sounded like an aircraft about to take off

Did you use Task Manager or another tool to look at the actual numbers? The increased noise from your machine was probably the processor (or perhaps a case) fan kicking in; increased temperature can be a sign of greater hard drive activity (i.e. use of the paging file), but without the memory usage figures it's a bit difficult to track the problem down. Conceivably, a hard drive is getting a bit hot just because Eraser is working it hard (e.g when doing a large erase or erasing free space), and memory usage is actually normal.

Well, you'd think so. But a fair proportion of the issues reported on the forum have a broken or damaged runtime as the cause. In my experience, this isn't an issue just with Eraser or just with .NET; other applications and runtime libraries can have the same kind of problem. And, as I said, any memory management issues have to be ascribed to the runtime, because applications that use .NET are not allowed to manage memory for themselves.

David

I am not an Eraser programmer, but a long-time user; my views may not be the same as those of the Eraser programming team.Before posting, please read the top 4 topics in the Eraser FAQ, which already provide many of the answers users need.

As I said in earlier posts, I know of no way that the Eraser code as such could produce this, as .NET handles all memory management. On my Windows 7 system, the Eraser process when Idle uses about 17MB, so your result is clearly an aberration.

Do you have any other applications installed that use .NET; if so, what results do they give?

David

I am not an Eraser programmer, but a long-time user; my views may not be the same as those of the Eraser programming team.Before posting, please read the top 4 topics in the Eraser FAQ, which already provide many of the answers users need.

Apologies, I can't see your screenshots, I'll have to extrapolate from your descriptions.

The only known (and proven) cause of such a "leak" would be a task with a log which has... ballooned (pick gas of choice here. Hopefully none sulfur-containing ) The remedy would then be to delete the affected task, or clear the log from the task. I've also observed that memory consumption is proportional to the size of the Eraser task list. The larger the task list, the greater the memory consumption.

So, let's have a look at that first before we start turning into Microsoft

I develop Eraser but I am not an employee of Heidi Computers Ltd. My views do not represent those of Heidi Computers Ltd.Don't PM or Email me questions: they won't be answered any faster than on the forum and knowledge won't be accessible by all.

Joel wrote:I've also observed that memory consumption is proportional to the size of the Eraser task list. The larger the task list, the greater the memory consumption.

Is that also true when the Eraser process is running idle in the background, and not executing a task?

David

I am not an Eraser programmer, but a long-time user; my views may not be the same as those of the Eraser programming team.Before posting, please read the top 4 topics in the Eraser FAQ, which already provide many of the answers users need.

I develop Eraser but I am not an employee of Heidi Computers Ltd. My views do not represent those of Heidi Computers Ltd.Don't PM or Email me questions: they won't be answered any faster than on the forum and knowledge won't be accessible by all.

My task list contains exactly one task with 2 entries.I've seen that on start-up of eraser there's normal memory usage and the threads and memory consumption blows up when the tasks are executed.When the memory and threads are on the described level there's no possibility to kill the process, not with standard task manager, nor process explorer or pskill!You can only shut down the system, which takes a long long time because Windows itself seems to have problems to kill the process!If you need more details, please feel free to contact me. I'm also available in freenode with the nick jaeckel or in #libtom

Just to be sure, try deleting or renaming the Task List file, so that Eraser creates a new one, and seeing what happens.

David

I am not an Eraser programmer, but a long-time user; my views may not be the same as those of the Eraser programming team.Before posting, please read the top 4 topics in the Eraser FAQ, which already provide many of the answers users need.

DavidHB wrote:Well, you'd think so. But a fair proportion of the issues reported on the forum have a broken or damaged runtime as the cause. In my experience, this isn't an issue just with Eraser or just with .NET; other applications and runtime libraries can have the same kind of problem. And, as I said, any memory management issues have to be ascribed to the runtime, because applications that use .NET are not allowed to manage memory for themselves.

David

Well, I've installed the beta 6.1 version from 4th January, Eraser is sitting nicely at 22324kb and my pc isn't sounding like a US aircraft firing up.

Well, as previously indicated, it can't really be the code, because, under .NET, that is not actually allowed to handle memory. My guess is that the new installation fixed whatever the installer did wrong last time. But we'll never know for sure.

At least it's working now ...

David

I am not an Eraser programmer, but a long-time user; my views may not be the same as those of the Eraser programming team.Before posting, please read the top 4 topics in the Eraser FAQ, which already provide many of the answers users need.